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Nicole Kidman is enjoying a stunning renaissance, and she is not the only grown-up woman with something to celebrate. Here, Katie Grand, editor-in-chief of LOVE magazine, salutes a constellation of clever, cool women, from Iman to Miss Piggy, who star in her latest issue

As we were finishing our new issue of LOVE, it occurred to me that it features a lot of older women. If it celebrates that diversity then I’m glad, but that wasn’t something we set out to do. We simply drew up a list of glamorous, inspirational women with whom we wanted to work. It’s true that a number of them are over 50, but the line-up cuts across the generations.

We have everyone from the feminist artist Judith Bernstein, who’s 74, Susan Sarandon at 70 and Iman at 61, to Nicole Kidman, who has just celebrated her 50th birthday, and 46-year-old Jennifer Connelly. But there’s also Blake Lively, not yet 30, and 21-year-old Kendall Jenner. Miss Piggy also makes an appearance, but she has been saying she’s in her 20s since 1974 at least… Whatever their age, the qualities that all these women share are a maturity of perspective and an ability to transform the environment they perform in.

One thing that struck me when I was working with them was their humility. Susan Sarandon, Candice Bergen, Sally Field and Brooke Shields, for example, who we invited to the studio in New York for a shoot with Patrick Demarchelier. They could easily get away with the sort of behaviour that sometimes comes with profiles such as theirs. Yet when you meet them, they are flattered and surprised that you want to work with them.

That isn’t to say that the experience wasn’t intimidating. Susan has a wisdom that makes her terrifying; she can see through everything around her. When it comes to selecting my cover stars, my instinct has always been to look beyond the obvious pool of faces. Back in 2000, for issue one of Pop – the first magazine that I ever edited on my own – I put my friends and peers Stella McCartney, Luella Bartley and Phoebe Philo on the cover; they weren’t young models, nor were they strictly sample-size, but they were significant figures in fashion, and featuring them on the cover said something about the time and also the direction of the magazine.

For the first issue of LOVE in 2009 I put Beth Ditto on the front. She was not the most obvious candidate for the cover of a fashion magazine, and yet that issue sold in huge numbers. I like to think that that was down to the exuberance for which she is known and loved, and the boldness of the image we ran (she was naked). Readers deserve something better than editors playing it safe. What unites all of these clever, cool women down the years, whether it’s Stella and Beth, or Iman, Jennifer and Nicole? They all excite us, regardless of their age.

Nicole Kidman

It’s an exceptionally busy year for Nicole Kidman, one that is seeing the release of three feature films – The Beguiled, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and How to Talk to Girls at Parties – in which she stars, and two major TV series, Big Little Lies and Top of the Lake. ‘It’s pretty phenomenal,’ she says. ‘I look back at it and think, how did I do that?’ But what impresses is not so much the quantity of her output as the scope of the directors she has worked with. ‘What an amazing gift, being given those film-makers in the same year. And they’re so different: Jean-Marc Vallée, Jane Campion, Yorgos Lanthimos and Sofia Coppola.

I’m like – WHAT?!’ Vallée’s Big Little Lies and Campion’s Top of the Lake represent a return to TV for Kidman after 25 years (Blossom Films, which she co-founded with Reese Witherspoon, produced Big Little Lies). Original, ambitious and bold TV drama is enjoying a renaissance at the moment. Is this what has prompted Kidman’s return to the small screen? ‘There’s no real strategy or thought behind it – I just kind of go where I feel like going. Which has been to both my detriment and my advantage at times. I’m very drawn to working with my friends: working with people I know, or who I feel are auteurs. So a lot of it is just driven by the storyteller, the film-maker.’

Iman is a byword for power chic, for supreme glamour. There is something untouchable about her in photography. In the flesh, she still transfixes a room. And, at the age of 61, she is as active as ever. ‘What’s the alternative?’ she asks me. ‘I’ve had a good life, you know. But I’m in the here and now and it’s best to celebrate at any given time whatever time you’re in. That’s the only way to live.’ Day to day, she is busy with her make-up and skincare line, Iman Cosmetics, a business that she began in 1994, by necessity. ‘Whenever I would go to a fashion shoot,’ she says, ‘all the black models would ask to use whatever [make-up] I had…’

The Somali-born philanthropist and businesswoman also points out other powerful women in the cosmetics industry who, like her, were immigrants: ‘Women like Helena Rubinstein and Estée Lauder – first of all, both of them were immigrants. They came from Europe and started successful businesses as women. This [the US] is a country of immigrants and a country where things for women are possible. You can make it.’

Louis Vuitton’s creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière, is trying to recall the first time he met Jennifer Connelly. ‘When was your Oscar?’ he asks. ‘That’s always a good reference.’ It was in 2002, Connelly’s annus mirabilis, launching an acting career in which she has established a reputation as a magnetic screen presence with a palpable darkness behind her eyes. The film was A Beautiful Mind, for which Jennifer collected an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta, at each ceremony wearing Ghesquière’s defining work for Balenciaga.

Did that first dress he made for her bring good luck that fateful awards season? ‘Maybe. For me, as soon as I found [Ghesquière’s] work and his aesthetic, I felt so at home in it. I keep being pulled back to it. Professionally, it always made a lot of sense to me. I appreciate good design and, when picking things to wear, I am quite particular. ‘I put a lot of attention into the things that I select, whether that’s furniture in our house or kitchen utensils or something that I wear. I think about my choices. Not as performance for anyone else, just because I like to pick things that resonate with me or have meaning to me.’